Health checks for the Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics app

Did you know that the Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics app has a series of health checks built right into it?

These check for several of the most common configuration issues we’ve seen, like

CDR data going into the wrong index

CDR data not timestamped or extracted properly

Lookups that are missing or broken

And quite a few more.

How do I run them?

Under the Setup menu the very last item is Run health checks.

What do I do then?

If all your health checks are green and start with “OK – …” then your job is done. Mission accomplished. Feel free to take the rest of the day off!

Otherwise, read the information provided closely. We tried to use very specific words and generally be clear about what’s going on. In many cases we try to give a hint where to look to correct the problem, for instance:

ERROR: The Clusters lookup has 1 Cluster(s) that have no valid locale set. Visit “Setup” > “Define clusters” to set them.

Obviously your first place to start would be Setup > DefineClusters and look for a field called locale that’s empty or invalid.

Sometimes we just hint at things that may or may not be a problem, like in this example:

WARNING – There were 0 calls during the last full hour. This is not the first time, perhaps it’s even normal.

That’s telling you that the previous hour had no calls, but that looking backwards in time shows this may not really be unusual. Perhaps it’s your 6-7 AM Monday morning call volume is *typically* zero, so this isn’t unusual at all. Compare that with a different “failure” of that same health check:

ERROR – There were 0 calls during the last full hour. Is your forwarder still forwarding?

That’s actually the same final condition – in this case 6-7 AM Monday morning had zero calls – but with a different history – one where 6-7 AM had more than zero calls in each of the last few weeks. That changes this from being a WARNING that something may or may not be wrong to an ERROR that’s it’s likely something *is* wrong.

Wrapping up

The health check pages can often help pinpoint things going wrong – forwarders that went missing, data that stopped coming in and so on. Knowing that we have checks built into the product for many of the most common issues can really save a lot of time in diagnosing why your reports suddenly turned blank.

Of course if you had any questions on any failed (or passed) health checks, if you found them especially useful in solving a problem, or even if you *didn’t* find them useful, please drop us a line and let us know!